A House of Air. Hermione Lee

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СКАЧАТЬ is warmth and dignity in Salem, the warmth of neighbourliness and the dignity of self-help. To them comes Arthur Vincent, their just-elected minister, a gentlemanly young scholar fresh from theological college, ‘in the bloom of hope and intellectualism,’ asking only for room to proclaim the truth to all men. He is met by what Mrs Oliphant calls ‘a cold plunge.’ Salem wants him to fill the pews with acceptable sermons, and to do his duty at tea-meetings.

      There is a strong hint, too, that the very best a young minister can do is to choose a wife from the flock, which in practice means the pinkly blooming Phoebe Tozer, the grocer’s daughter. He is told of another young pastor who failed ‘all along of the women; they didn’t like his wife, and he fell off dreadful.’ Arthur’s instincts prompt him to escape. ‘Their approbation chafed him, and if he went beyond their level, what mercy was he to expect?’ As in the two previous novels of the series, Carlingford will prove a test for the newcomer that is all the more painful because it is only half understood. Salem Chapel makes no claim to show the impact of Dissent on English life. There can be no kind of comparison, for instance, with George Eliot’s treatment of Methodism in Adam Bede. Non-conformism is not even shown as a significant moral force. ‘As a matter of fact,’ Mrs Oliphant admitted, ‘I knew nothing about chapels, but took the sentiment and a few details from our old church in Liverpool, which was Free Church of Scotland, and where there were a few grocers and other such good folk whose ways with the ministers were wonderful to behold.’ One of her earlier editors, W. Robertson Nicholl, pointed out that she got several of these details wrong. But this, even if she had realized it, would not have deterred Mrs Oliphant.

      What she did understand, from the depths of her Scottish being, was the power of the spoken word as a communication from heart to heart. Arthur Vincent’s progress as a preacher, through the length of the book, is from mere eloquence to a painful success (which he no longer wants) before an assembly that ‘scarcely dares draw breath.’ In the second place, Salem, as she presents it, is a small community which, however comfortable and unassuming it is, claims a power that may be beyond the human range. Her concern is still with the urgent question that she had raised in The Rector: what does it mean for a man, living among men, to call himself their priest? Vincent has received his title to ordination, not from a bishop, but from the vote of the congregation itself, and when he first arrives in Carlingford he is proud of this. He agrees to deliver a course of lectures attacking the Church of England, a hierarchy paid for by the State. But the experience of ministry makes him question not only what he is doing, but who he is. If he is answerable to God for the souls of human beings, can these same human beings hold authority over him?

      Almost certainly Mrs Oliphant had in mind two great unorthodox Scottish ministers, Edward Irving and George Macdonald, both rejected for heresy by their congregations. Only a year earlier, in 1860, she had been writing her memoir of Irving, in which she let fly, with generous indignation, at the ‘homely old men, unqualified for deciding any question which required clear heads,’ who had passed judgement on the great preacher. And Arthur Vincent, like Irving, comes to dream of a universal Church, with Christ as its only head, ‘not yet realised, but surely real.’ Irving, however, was the son of a tanner, and Macdonald the son of a crofter. Both of them were giants of men, with their own primitive grandeur, quite unlike the dapper young man from Homerton. But the distant echo of their battles can be heard in Salem Chapel.

      Arthur believes that his first duty is to save himself from ‘having the life crushed out of him by ruthless chapel-mongers,’ all the more so because he constantly risks the ludicrous. His meditation on his high calling as a soldier of the Cross is interrupted by Phoebe Tozer, who blushingly comes to offer him a leftover dish of jelly. But, at all levels, the conflict is not as simple as he believes. The real fighting ground is psychological. He could, for example, have accepted the dish of jelly graciously, Mrs Oliphant tells us, if he had not been a poor widow’s son. His poverty and his Dissent give a painful edge to his ambition. English society, he finds, in Carlingford as elsewhere, is ‘a phalanx of orders and classes standing above him, standing close in order to prevent his entrance.’ He had hoped to make Salem a centre of light. Now, as Salem’s minister, he finds himself shaking hands ‘which had just clutched a piece of bacon.’ And in all the pride—not to say the vanity—of his intellect, he discovers not only how difficult it is to accept these people, but how easy it is to manipulate them. He sees himself as a teller of tales to children, and feels delighted, in spite of himself, with his own cleverness. This two-edged danger returns more than once. He grows disgusted with his own work, but ‘contemptuous of those who were pleased with it.’

      In Mrs Oliphant’s novels, men turn for help to women. But in Carlingford the two women who mean most to Arthur act, in a sense, as his opponents without intending it or even knowing it. Beautiful Lady Western, with whom he falls so disastrously and pitiably in love, means no harm, either to him or to anyone else. She is quite conscious of her power, but not of the damage it is doing. Then there is Mrs Vincent, Arthur’s mother. The formal distance between Mrs Oliphant and her subject is often very slight, particularly when she introduces these frail, anxious widows who come to the rescue of their families with the unexpected strength of ten. Evidently she is drawing on her own experience here, and indulging herself a little. There is too much about the widow’s self-sacrifice, and far too much about her spotless white caps. But Mrs Oliphant is still able to take a clear look at Mrs Vincent. She loves Arthur dearly, her simple faith puts him to shame, and in his defence she confronts Salem, and even Lady Western, successfully, but she is a minister’s widow, and to her the ministry is everything. Nothing can make her see beyond the limits of pastoral duty. For this reason, in the end, she can be of comfort, but not of help, to her son.

      Arthur Vincent’s struggle is a real one, and not only in terms of the mid-nineteenth century. He has enough to contend with, it might he thought, in Salem. Why did Mrs Oliphant feel it necessary to involve him, as she does, in such a lurid sub-plot? It starts off well enough with the mysterious, sardonic Mrs Hilyard, stitching away for a living at coarse material that draws blood from her hands. She and her dark sense of injustice are successfully presented, and it seems appropriate that she eventually puts the crucial question of the book, when she begs Arthur, as a priest, to curse her enemy, and he offers instead, as a priest, to bless her. But when the eagle-faced Colonel Mildmay makes his appearance (‘“She-Wolf!” cried the man, grinding his teeth’), and Arthur and his mother begin to chase up and down the length of England to save his sister from ‘polluting arms,’ the effect is not so much mystery as bewilderment, turning, sooner or later, to irritation. Arthur himself is singularly inefficient—at one point he arrives at London Bridge just in time to ‘glimpse’ not one, but two of his suspects gliding out of the station in separate carriages. Even Mrs Oliphant herself became doubtful about her contrivances. ‘I am afraid,’ she wrote to her publishers, ‘the machinery I have set in motion is rather extensive for the short limits I had intended.’

      Like her contemporary Mrs Gaskell, she was not at ease with the ‘machinery,’ and this is the only time it appears in the Carlingford Chronicles. It is true that she was an admirer of Wilkie Collins (though not of Dickens), and in particular of The Woman in White. In May 1862 she wrote a piece for Blackwood’s under the title ‘Sensation Novels,’ which praised Collins for using ‘recognisable human agents’ rather than supernatural ones. But the goings-on of Colonel Mildmay are not much, if at all, in the style of The Woman in White. They are stock melodrama—abduction, bloodshed, repentance—though admittedly there is nothing supernatural about them. Mrs Oliphant however, was determined to produce a bestseller at all costs, and she did. Salem Chapel began running as a serial in Blackwood’s for February 1862, and came out in book form in 1863. ‘It went very near,’ she recollected, ‘to making me one of the popularities of literature.’ It paid the family’s bills, at least for the time being, and gave her the courage to ask an unheard-of £1,500 for her next novel.

      This was a sturdy professional attitude, but I think she had another reason for the sensational elements in Salem Chapel. Arthur Vincent cannot come to terms with himself, or with his gift of words, until he has encountered СКАЧАТЬ